Log in or start a trial to access this article

France fast-tracks its floating wind flotillas

IN DEPTH | France has yet to put steel in the water on its first fixed-bottom offshore wind farms, but its four flagship floating arrays are steaming towards start-up in 2020, writes Darius Snieckus

Provence Grand Large, Leucate, Gruissan and Groix: names assured a place in the great maritime adventure being written by the floating wind sector. Together representing a humble 100MW of seaborne power, the four pilot projects could nonetheless be transformative for the wind industry, opening up the world’s deeper waters — the vast majority of the globe’s oceanic acreage — to an industry that is already planning to build 400GW of fixed-bottom offshore capacity in the next 30 years.

Floating wind — easily tailorable to varying water depths, low-cost to install, well-suited to serial construction quayside — could change the economics for a sector on the cusp of global industrialisation as its levelised cost of energy (LCoE) becomes competitive with mainstream power sources.

However, the technology needs to first see arrays proven in the field. Solo turbines have so far been deployed off Norway (Hywind 1) and Portugal (WindFloat 1), while the last of three experimental floating machines at the 14MW Fukushima Forward demonstrator project off Japan were brough on line last year.

These pioneering units have shown the technology to be technically viable — whether the foundations are giant cigar-shaped spars, hulking half-submerged semi-submersibles, or hybrids of the two. Now it falls to the coming arrays to determine floating wind’s commercial and industrial future.

The flagship technology will again be the Hywind, with five 6MW next-generation units installed off Scotland this year at the 30MW Buchan Deep project. But close behind are the 25MW WindFloat Atlantic off Portugal, and France’s quartet of 25MW flotillas.

The four French projects currently moving forward — at sites in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic awarded by French environment and energy agency Ademe last year — embody the French spirit of “la différence”. They have different developers, different floating hull concepts, different marine environments and different turbine models.

“The French government has been a strong supporter of floating wind – and this shows in the fact that these pilots farms will see more than €300m invested by the government as well as providing the feed-in tariff (FIT) [of €240/MWh for 20 years] it has,” says Matthieu Monnier, head of the industry and offshore wind unit at French wind association France Energie Eolienne (FEE). “This is the biggest investment so far in pilot floating wind farms in the world.

“Having had the experience it has with fixed-bottom wind [where two tender awards have been held, but no wind farms yet built], we feel [energy] minister [Ségolène] Royal wants to get it right straight away with floating and will do everything that needs to done to support this sector.”

The build-out goals set out by Paris last October aspire to have an ocean energy fleet of 200MW-2GW switched on by 2023 — though this includes tidal and other marine renewables alongside floating wind.

First commercial-scale floating wind sites are slated to be announced this autumn, Monnier notes, with “big expectations of favourable policy” now that Emmanuel Macron has been elected president of France.

"The capacity of the pilots may seem relatively small, but these first projects get everything moving in the right direction"

Still, the FEE is lobbying for Paris to demonstrate even greater ambition for floating wind, calling for a 2GW tender in January 2018 as a springboard to having 6GW moored and turning in French waters by 2030.

“There are several regions of France — Brittany and Provence among them — where renewable energy is difficult to produce with onshore wind and solar. And floating wind offers an alternative — one that can almost not be seen from shore,” says Monnier. “And these regions also see the potential for industrial development to support the [floating wind] sector’s development.

“The capacity [of the pilots] — 100MW — may seem relatively small, but these first projects get everything moving in the right direction,” he adds.

The flagship of the French floating fleet, a 2MW prototype being built by Ideol in Saint-Nazaire for the EU’s €25m (($27.7m) FloatGen technology-testing project, is on track to be deployed this autumn in the Atlantic. The design, a concrete “damping pool” barge, is also cued up for one of the four pilots — the 25MW EolMed project being developed by Quadran iin the Mediterranean.

Ideol chief executive Paul de la Guérivière doesn’t underestimate the importance of these pilots, or the challenges that will be faced on the 25MW arrays.

“Post-2020, we expect to have projects of around 50 units, with wind turbines of between 10MW and 20MW, built and installed in 20 months, and to do between two and four of these projects per year,” he says. “This presents three key challenges: how will we build all these units; how will we finance these projects; and how will we further lower the costs and so the LCOE of floating wind, from the levels we will see on the first 100MW of pilot projects?

“These are tremendous challenges. So, to finance future projects we need to support commercial tenders by ensuring the bankability of floating wind, which will help convince utilities to put billions of euros in our projects, not in other energy assets.

“To do this, we need [to prove] through these demonstrators that we can further reduce the costs, and we will reduce the risk — on the capex [capital expenditure] and on the devex [development expenditure] and on the opex [operating expenditure]. For that you need real-life experience. This is what [the pilots] represent.”

Gilles Duchesne, floating wind business manager at SBM Offshore, an offshore oil sector stalwart that is designing an all-steel tension-leg platform for EDF’s 25MW Provence Grand Large array, agrees the pilots could abruptly set the wheels in motion on industrialisation of floating wind.

French wind lobbying for 2GW floating tender ‘early next year’

“These are the first publicly tendered floating wind projects in the world. The government’s approach is very specific to France and how it launches industries — it has used a similar model to launch other industries, such as high-speed trains [and] nuclear power,” he notes.

“The scheme put in place by the government and Ademe I feel is quite clever. Having four different solutions being proposed will make it easier to see which are the most visible — in terms of LCOE, in terms of performance of the systems, and in terms of which can create an industrial ecosystem that will facilitate floating wind’s export worldwide.”

Industrialisation based on mass-produced floating turbines is the axis around which this turns. Whereas Ideol has linked up with civil engineering outfit Bouygues Travaux Public, which wants to bring its nous for serial production of concrete structures into the equation, SBM is counting on its decades-long experience in building floating structures for the oil industry to give the sector an economic leg-up.

French naval giant DCNS, which is delivering the advanced concrete-steel semi-sub for Eolfi/China General Nuclear’s 25MW Groix & Belle Île array in the Atlantic, reckons it has the right recipe in its “mix of both partners and materials” to move floating wind swiftly into industrialisation.

"You cannot deploy gigawatts [of floating wind] at any price. It has to be done in an intelligent way"

“We — I mean us, [contractor] Vinci and [turbine supplier] GE — were a little surprised by the French government’s approach [to the pilots] but giving a chance to as many different concepts as possible does provide more of a range when it comes to moving into the industrialisation phase,” says Frédéric Chino, DCNS’s ocean-energy sales manager.

“The hard reality is that, probably, not all four [floater designs] will survive to commercialisation but that’s a competitive market and the French government has made clear it does not want to waste any time in getting the winning designs into the commercial tenders to come.”

The veteran in France’s first floating wind sortie is US outfit Principle Power Inc (PPI), which has been awarded the 25MW Leucate project in the Mediterranean as part of a project consortium made up of developers Engie and EDPR, bank Caisse des Dépôts and OEM GE.

It is the only technology developer among the four with the experience of building, installing, running — and decommissioning — a industrial-scale prototype, the 2MW Windfloat 1.

Shief executive Joao Metelo says the insights gleaned from its flagship — from yard construction though five years’ operation at sea to dismantling onshore — means it will be able to accelerate development of Leucate.

“This is going to be a fast-track project: it will be done in half the time of our prototype. Having the partners we do is hugely important — Engie leading the charge in negotiating with the EU and French government, [construction contractor] Eiffage moving ahead with its planning to build the Leucate units, and us keeping our focus on the technology.

“And on a parallel path we, like many others, are organising ourselves to bid in [France’s] first commercial tender when it’s announced next year.”

Business development manager Guillaume Ardoise adds: “Eiffage has a rail- and port-connected facility not far from Marseille and so working with them on Leucate will help make the case for future, commercial-scale deployments.”

France has been notoriously slow in getting its conventional offshore wind industry out of harbour, with the first of its Round 1 tendered projects only now approaching construction and a rethink under way on the upcoming 750MW Dunkirk zone auction, in the light of the recent zero-subsidy acreage off Germany.

Saint-Nazaire anoints the next floating wind crusader

Facing further complications and restrictions connected to marine spatial planning in its waters, the French regions and national government are increasingly eyeing floating wind — which needs no seabed piling and can be deployed further from the coastline to quell Nimbyism — as a ready-made job-generating answer to the country’s energy transition.

“Right now our ambition is to develop ‘macro-zones’ of floating wind. To begin with, two in Brittany in the north and two in the Mediterranean — one in the Golfe du Lion and the other off Provence Côte D’Azur — that could be broken up into four zones each, totalling the 2GW,” notes Monnier. “But there is much more than this to develop — and regional industrial clusters with it — and we want to see it done in a sensible way.”

Philippe Veyan, director of projects at EDF EN, recently cautioned against a high-risk “full-speed-ahead” approach to commercialisation of floating wind off France, saying: “You cannot deploy gigawatts [of floating wind] at any price. It has to be done in an intelligent way. These are very complex projects. We have to push hard for 2018 [when construction of the four pilot projects is slated to be under way] while keeping an eye on the long-term potential.” Monnier agrees a “balance has to be struck”.

“We need to take care of the pilot farms first, this is true. What we are proposing is entirely manageable if you consider the timeline for these projects — commissioning in 2020-21 — and if we launch a bona fide commercial phase from 2018 we will have three years between the two,” says Monnier. “This will allow enough time to prove the bankability of floating wind and then the financing and the construction of the first commercial floating wind farms [will follow].

“We can deliver on floating wind. This is where we prove it and how we show leadership in the global floating wind build-out.”

Premium subscription at less than $5 per business day!

Stay tuned with our free daily newsletter

Be in the know of the most important headline every day

France fast-tracks its floating wind flotillas

IN DEPTH | France has yet to put steel in the water on its first fixed-bottom offshore wind farms, but its four flagship floating arrays are steaming towards start-up in 2020, writes Darius Snieckus

Provence Grand Large, Leucate, Gruissan and Groix: names assured a place in the great maritime adventure being written by the floating wind sector. Together representing a humble 100MW of seaborne power, the four pilot projects could nonetheless be transformative for the wind industry, opening up the world’s deeper waters — the vast majority of the globe’s oceanic acreage — to an industry that is already planning to build 400GW of fixed-bottom offshore capacity in the next 30 years.

Floating wind — easily tailorable to varying water depths, low-cost to install, well-suited to serial construction quayside — could change the economics for a sector on the cusp of global industrialisation as its levelised cost of energy (LCoE) becomes competitive with mainstream power sources.

However, the technology needs to first see arrays proven in the field. Solo turbines have so far been deployed off Norway (Hywind 1) and Portugal (WindFloat 1), while the last of three experimental floating machines at the 14MW Fukushima Forward demonstrator project off Japan were brough on line last year.

These pioneering units have shown the technology to be technically viable — whether the foundations are giant cigar-shaped spars, hulking half-submerged semi-submersibles, or hybrids of the two. Now it falls to the coming arrays to determine floating wind’s commercial and industrial future.

The flagship technology will again be the Hywind, with five 6MW next-generation units installed off Scotland this year at the 30MW Buchan Deep project. But close behind are the 25MW WindFloat Atlantic off Portugal, and France’s quartet of 25MW flotillas.

The four French projects currently moving forward — at sites in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic awarded by French environment and energy agency Ademe last year — embody the French spirit of “la différence”. They have different developers, different floating hull concepts, different marine environments and different turbine models.

“The French government has been a strong supporter of floating wind – and this shows in the fact that these pilots farms will see more than €300m invested by the government as well as providing the feed-in tariff (FIT) [of €240/MWh for 20 years] it has,” says Matthieu Monnier, head of the industry and offshore wind unit at French wind association France Energie Eolienne (FEE). “This is the biggest investment so far in pilot floating wind farms in the world.

“Having had the experience it has with fixed-bottom wind [where two tender awards have been held, but no wind farms yet built], we feel [energy] minister [Ségolène] Royal wants to get it right straight away with floating and will do everything that needs to done to support this sector.”

The build-out goals set out by Paris last October aspire to have an ocean energy fleet of 200MW-2GW switched on by 2023 — though this includes tidal and other marine renewables alongside floating wind.

First commercial-scale floating wind sites are slated to be announced this autumn, Monnier notes, with “big expectations of favourable policy” now that Emmanuel Macron has been elected president of France.

"The capacity of the pilots may seem relatively small, but these first projects get everything moving in the right direction"

Still, the FEE is lobbying for Paris to demonstrate even greater ambition for floating wind, calling for a 2GW tender in January 2018 as a springboard to having 6GW moored and turning in French waters by 2030.

“There are several regions of France — Brittany and Provence among them — where renewable energy is difficult to produce with onshore wind and solar. And floating wind offers an alternative — one that can almost not be seen from shore,” says Monnier. “And these regions also see the potential for industrial development to support the [floating wind] sector’s development.

“The capacity [of the pilots] — 100MW — may seem relatively small, but these first projects get everything moving in the right direction,” he adds.

The flagship of the French floating fleet, a 2MW prototype being built by Ideol in Saint-Nazaire for the EU’s €25m (($27.7m) FloatGen technology-testing project, is on track to be deployed this autumn in the Atlantic. The design, a concrete “damping pool” barge, is also cued up for one of the four pilots — the 25MW EolMed project being developed by Quadran iin the Mediterranean.

Ideol chief executive Paul de la Guérivière doesn’t underestimate the importance of these pilots, or the challenges that will be faced on the 25MW arrays.

“Post-2020, we expect to have projects of around 50 units, with wind turbines of between 10MW and 20MW, built and installed in 20 months, and to do between two and four of these projects per year,” he says. “This presents three key challenges: how will we build all these units; how will we finance these projects; and how will we further lower the costs and so the LCOE of floating wind, from the levels we will see on the first 100MW of pilot projects?

“These are tremendous challenges. So, to finance future projects we need to support commercial tenders by ensuring the bankability of floating wind, which will help convince utilities to put billions of euros in our projects, not in other energy assets.

“To do this, we need [to prove] through these demonstrators that we can further reduce the costs, and we will reduce the risk — on the capex [capital expenditure] and on the devex [development expenditure] and on the opex [operating expenditure]. For that you need real-life experience. This is what [the pilots] represent.”

Gilles Duchesne, floating wind business manager at SBM Offshore, an offshore oil sector stalwart that is designing an all-steel tension-leg platform for EDF’s 25MW Provence Grand Large array, agrees the pilots could abruptly set the wheels in motion on industrialisation of floating wind.

French wind lobbying for 2GW floating tender ‘early next year’

“These are the first publicly tendered floating wind projects in the world. The government’s approach is very specific to France and how it launches industries — it has used a similar model to launch other industries, such as high-speed trains [and] nuclear power,” he notes.

“The scheme put in place by the government and Ademe I feel is quite clever. Having four different solutions being proposed will make it easier to see which are the most visible — in terms of LCOE, in terms of performance of the systems, and in terms of which can create an industrial ecosystem that will facilitate floating wind’s export worldwide.”

Industrialisation based on mass-produced floating turbines is the axis around which this turns. Whereas Ideol has linked up with civil engineering outfit Bouygues Travaux Public, which wants to bring its nous for serial production of concrete structures into the equation, SBM is counting on its decades-long experience in building floating structures for the oil industry to give the sector an economic leg-up.

French naval giant DCNS, which is delivering the advanced concrete-steel semi-sub for Eolfi/China General Nuclear’s 25MW Groix & Belle Île array in the Atlantic, reckons it has the right recipe in its “mix of both partners and materials” to move floating wind swiftly into industrialisation.

"You cannot deploy gigawatts [of floating wind] at any price. It has to be done in an intelligent way"

“We — I mean us, [contractor] Vinci and [turbine supplier] GE — were a little surprised by the French government’s approach [to the pilots] but giving a chance to as many different concepts as possible does provide more of a range when it comes to moving into the industrialisation phase,” says Frédéric Chino, DCNS’s ocean-energy sales manager.

“The hard reality is that, probably, not all four [floater designs] will survive to commercialisation but that’s a competitive market and the French government has made clear it does not want to waste any time in getting the winning designs into the commercial tenders to come.”

The veteran in France’s first floating wind sortie is US outfit Principle Power Inc (PPI), which has been awarded the 25MW Leucate project in the Mediterranean as part of a project consortium made up of developers Engie and EDPR, bank Caisse des Dépôts and OEM GE.

It is the only technology developer among the four with the experience of building, installing, running — and decommissioning — a industrial-scale prototype, the 2MW Windfloat 1.

Shief executive Joao Metelo says the insights gleaned from its flagship — from yard construction though five years’ operation at sea to dismantling onshore — means it will be able to accelerate development of Leucate.

“This is going to be a fast-track project: it will be done in half the time of our prototype. Having the partners we do is hugely important — Engie leading the charge in negotiating with the EU and French government, [construction contractor] Eiffage moving ahead with its planning to build the Leucate units, and us keeping our focus on the technology.

“And on a parallel path we, like many others, are organising ourselves to bid in [France’s] first commercial tender when it’s announced next year.”

Business development manager Guillaume Ardoise adds: “Eiffage has a rail- and port-connected facility not far from Marseille and so working with them on Leucate will help make the case for future, commercial-scale deployments.”

France has been notoriously slow in getting its conventional offshore wind industry out of harbour, with the first of its Round 1 tendered projects only now approaching construction and a rethink under way on the upcoming 750MW Dunkirk zone auction, in the light of the recent zero-subsidy acreage off Germany.

Saint-Nazaire anoints the next floating wind crusader

Facing further complications and restrictions connected to marine spatial planning in its waters, the French regions and national government are increasingly eyeing floating wind — which needs no seabed piling and can be deployed further from the coastline to quell Nimbyism — as a ready-made job-generating answer to the country’s energy transition.

“Right now our ambition is to develop ‘macro-zones’ of floating wind. To begin with, two in Brittany in the north and two in the Mediterranean — one in the Golfe du Lion and the other off Provence Côte D’Azur — that could be broken up into four zones each, totalling the 2GW,” notes Monnier. “But there is much more than this to develop — and regional industrial clusters with it — and we want to see it done in a sensible way.”

Philippe Veyan, director of projects at EDF EN, recently cautioned against a high-risk “full-speed-ahead” approach to commercialisation of floating wind off France, saying: “You cannot deploy gigawatts [of floating wind] at any price. It has to be done in an intelligent way. These are very complex projects. We have to push hard for 2018 [when construction of the four pilot projects is slated to be under way] while keeping an eye on the long-term potential.” Monnier agrees a “balance has to be struck”.

“We need to take care of the pilot farms first, this is true. What we are proposing is entirely manageable if you consider the timeline for these projects — commissioning in 2020-21 — and if we launch a bona fide commercial phase from 2018 we will have three years between the two,” says Monnier. “This will allow enough time to prove the bankability of floating wind and then the financing and the construction of the first commercial floating wind farms [will follow].

“We can deliver on floating wind. This is where we prove it and how we show leadership in the global floating wind build-out.”